In this archive, you can find life forms such as: fungi, memes, flora & fauna, plushies, popular children’s show characters, cryptids and urban legends. The process of foraging most often happens on Google and gets stuffed into pocket-folders of different categories. The pathways of research have become both futile/fertile grounds for knowledge gathering.
On some foraging expeditions, the shape or colour of an image is the only grounds for adding it to the archive. Other times I come across a frightening Teddy Bear made by Jean-Paul Gaultier, the lesbian lizards of Mexico or the fungi that control the minds of insects before devouring them. Ever heard of slug sex?
The entanglement of life forms existing within the traps we are tethered to feels like an undeniable facet of existence, or of pinpointing the last sliver of sublimity on our ruin. ‘Imaging the human since the rise of capitalism entangles us with ideas of progress and with the spread of techniques of alienation that turn both humans and other species into resources. Such techniques have segregated humans and policed identities, obscuring collaborative survival”
Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (p19)
And so, I appropriate the image of the living as it floats around us. I catch them and entangle them together. Simultaneously, the image (as it exists for consumption only) is problematic. It has the luxury of being swallowed within ephemeral seconds. Thus, this archive does not end as an image but remains a becoming. You see, the mutation doesn’t end. ‘Nuptials are the opposite of a couple. There are no longer binary machines: question-answer, masculine-feminine, man-animal, etc. This could be what a conversation is - simply the outline of a becoming’
Gilles Deleuze/Claire Parnet in The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson (p7)
You will watch the body writhing in the coat that holds the mutations as it mutates. The performance takes time, it takes space, it uses language. The only things that feel non-commodifiable at the end of the road.
